


True North

by DeathByTeacups



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: BAMF Natasha Romanov, Bisexual Bucky Barnes, Bucky Barnes & Steve Rogers Friendship, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Bucky Barnes Has Nightmares, Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Bucky Barnes Has Panic Attacks, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky and Rebecca Barnes siblingship, M/M, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Natasha and Steve have History, Past Relationship(s), Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Protective Bucky Barnes, Protective Natasha Romanov, Protective Steve Rogers, Rebecca Barnes has Dementia, Steve Rogers as the Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:21:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23307481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeathByTeacups/pseuds/DeathByTeacups
Summary: Everything after that was blurr, just a man in a lab coat standing over him, the guards shouting, red lights flashing as a siren blared, and distant gunfire. The whole time his own voice rang in his ears repeating over and over again those damn words he always fell back to, outdated now but tumbling out of his mouth all the same.Then a shadow that moved through the room, dark and silent as death itself, and his bonds were gone. He could remember the touch of a leather glove to his face, sweeping back the hair from his forehead, pulling him from the depths of his panic, but it was gone by the time he came back to himself fully. His restraints were gone. The operatives in the bunker were all dead. His gear on the table against the wall had his comm on the very top, a distress signal blinking red against the darkened room.***After months of Bucky desperately trying to track Steve down, the Winter Soldier finds him first. Then keeps finding him.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 7
Kudos: 43





	1. First Contact

**Author's Note:**

> I've been writing this for months, and finally got up the balls to post. Not Beta read, so please let me know if you find anything wrong, or if something reads strangely.  
> The first chapter is very short.

“You’re awfully quiet tonight, Barnes.” Romanoff quipped as she dropped herself gracefully into the seat next to him on the Quinjet where Bucky had tucked himself away from the others. She crossed her legs, cocked her head just so to look at him, and held out a water bottle, a peace-offering or a bribe, he didn’t know. She had that calculating look in her eyes again, the one that made him feel like she was mentally taking him apart to see what made him tick. “What’s on your mind?”

  
Bucky lifted his head from his hands and took the bottle, sighing heavily as he leaned back to take a long pull from it. Her eyes on him as he swallowed made him nervous, so he drank more than he would have on his own, but she could probably tell he was trying to come up with something to tell her. Even if he knew how to explain what was going through his brain, he wasn’t exactly sure he’d want to tell Romanoff. Honestly, his mind was on the only thing it ever seemed to want to focus on anymore. From the moment that mask had clattered to the ground on that damn bridge, nothing else had mattered. After everything that had happened in D.C., he could just barely manage to keep himself concentrated on official Avengers missions long enough to get the job done, so he could hurry back home to try and dig up leads. It had been months, and nothing else seems to ever be on his mind anymore.

  
Romanoff made him uneasy, especially on the topic of Steve, -on the Winter Soldier. He always got the feeling that she wasn’t telling him everything, that she was trying to suss out if he knew more than she wanted him to. It felt stupid to think that, considering she was the one who handed him that god-awful file detailing what had become of Steve in the first place. But something about the way she looked at him -like she was testing him, like he had everything to lose if she found him lacking- spiked his paranoia more than he cared to admit. “Just the usual.” He shrugged and settled on a half-truth. Better not to lie to her outright. “Getting captured like that, it-it just sets me off.” He cut his eyes away, thumbing at the half-healed bruise on his jawline, not having to fake the thick swallow he forced down before adding miserably, “Worse than usual.”

  
The strike that took him down came out of nowhere, and he was a whole lot better than an ordinary human, but he wasn’t perfect. He’d gone down after a long fight, and the HYDRA operatives had overpowered him. Took eight of their best to do it, but they managed, then he’d woken up strapped to a fucking metal table in a concrete basement, and he may as well have been back in Azzano. His panicked mind was screaming that he was.

  
Everything after that was blurr, just a man in a lab coat standing over him, the guards shouting, red lights flashing as a siren blared, and distant gunfire. The whole time his own voice rang in his ears repeating over and over again those damn words he always fell back to, outdated now but tumbling out of his mouth all the same.

  
Then a shadow that moved through the room, dark and silent as death itself, and his bonds were gone. He could remember the touch of a leather glove to his face, sweeping back the hair from his forehead, pulling him from the depths of his panic, but it was gone by the time he came back to himself fully. His restraints were gone. The operatives in the bunker were all dead. His gear on the table against the wall had his comm on the very top, a distress signal blinking red against the darkened room.

  
He’d been racking his brain all day, ever since the Quinjet loaded with his teammates had picked him up from the hollowed-out bunker, but he couldn’t for the life of him decide if he’d only imagined that shadow sporting long blond hair...

  
Romanoff regarded him from behind her cunning, unreadable expression, before she let the vestiges of her polished smile drop and leaned back in her seat. Her red lips pursed as she seemed to weigh up what she said next. “It was him, wasn’t it?” All the bracing in the world wouldn’t really have prepared him for it, despite him already knowing what she was going to say. “I know you didn’t do all that damage on your own. Was it him?”

  
Bucky shook his head, eyes squeezing tight against the burn in his chest. It felt like too much, too risky to dare hope. Even if it was the Winter Soldier, that didn’t mean it was his Stevie. He’d read the file, he couldn’t imagine that there could be anything left of a person after all that. He knew that, he knew that, logically, but his traitorous mind kept drifting back to the brush of leather against his forehead.

  
“I don’t know.” He answered honestly. “I was pretty out of it. I didn’t really see.”

  
“There wasn’t another soul alive in that place.” Romanoff pushed, eyes boring a hole into his head as he leaned forward again, hiding his face in his hands. Cold anger crept into her voice, just enough for him to pick it up. “Just you, just your gear untouched, with everything else trashed. And you’re gonna tell me you didn’t see who it was?”

  
The roiling anxiety in his gut hardened into anger, and he growled as he dropped his hand to glare at her. “Don’t you think I wish I did?” He shot back, scowling. “At least then I could be sure it wasn’t him. Then I could stop fucking hoping so hard it hurts that maybe, maybe he remembers me, when we both know there’s no way he could.”

  
The anger left him as quickly as it came, leaving behind only the sick sense of discomfort that showing his cards like that always left him. He took a deep breath and reminded himself that he was supposed to be able to trust Romanoff and he could be honest with her. It wasn’t easy, with how his world had changed so drastically in recent years, to trust anyone with anything at all, and Steve was a topic he still wasn’t usually willing to discuss with anyone but Sam.

  
Romanoff sighed, and leaned forward to match him, face and posture softening in a way he supposed was probably her version of mercy. “I’m not an optimistic person by nature.” She started, then nipped his retort in the bud with a warning look. “But it certainly has to mean something, doesn’t it?”

  
“Nothing ever has to mean anything, Romanoff.” He mumbled back. She kicked gently at his ankle.

  
“No, logic this out with me, Barnes.” She propped her chin on her fist. “We know it’s most likely him that’s been knocking out HYDRA bases all over across the globe lately. It has to be, considering a good number of them we don’t even know about until there’s nothing left of them but ash. We knew about this base, so more than likely he had to, too. Then you get captured, and we get a distress signal after your comm had been off for almost six hours, and when we get there there’s nothing but bodies, all clean, efficient kills, and you, alive and shambling out of a newly wrecked base?”

  
Bucky scratched at the short clipped hair on the back of his head, not wanting to concede the points she laid out so plainly. “Maybe you’re right, maybe it was him.” He offers glumly. “There’s no telling what’s going through his head right now. It doesn’t mean he remembers anything.”

  
Romanoff fixed him with the most unimpressed look he’d ever seen. “Right. Because he left you, and only you, alive for no reason whatsoever.”

  
Bucky shrugged. “I was pretty obviously a prisoner.”

  
“Barnes, were you the one to send out that distress signal?” She asked, and Bucky froze up, unsure how she’d know that. “We were trying to get you to talk to us for about six minutes before you actually got on the comm. You didn’t send it, did you?”

  
Bucky swallowed. “No. It was already on when I found it.”

  
Romanoff had a pensive look to her, tapping her fingers against her chin. “So he left only you alive, cut you out of your restraints, and sent out a distress signal on your behalf.” She gave him an expectant look.

  
Bucky ground his teeth, trying to clamp down on the mess of squirming feelings in his guy, the painful clench of his chest as he fought back the idea. It was too much to hope for. He was going to be setting himself up for more heartache, he knew it. He had to be realistic about this.

  
He shrugged, leaning back to stuff his shaking hands into his pockets. “I was obviously a prisoner. Maybe it's just his moral compass, these days.”

  
Romanoff’s expression softened, and she offered him a patient smile. “Maybe it is.” She conceded. “But maybe not.”


	2. Visitor

A long flight back to New York and one hell of a debriefing later, Barton dropped him off at the front door to his apartment building just as the sun had started to sink below the horizon. His insides were still twisting into all sorts of uncomfortable shapes, between the remnants of his episode in the bunker, the ceaseless anxiety that had become constant since his first days in the present time, and the awful, heartbreaking hope that he just couldn’t seem to crush. He hadn’t been able to sleep since the capture, and by the time he was unlocking his apartment door, he felt ready to fall on his face from exhaustion. 

Behind his own locked door, he let himself sag under his own weight for the first time since before the mission-gone-bad. The paranoia was easier to manage here, alone in his own home, although the anxiety only tended to spike when he let himself rest, when there was nothing to distract himself with. Tonight, though, he was worn down enough to ignore the queasy feelings and just drop his gear haphazardly in the doorway. Shield, bag, jacket, and boots all littered the ground just inside the door before Bucky even moved further into the apartment. 

He barely made it into the living room before a firm hand landed on his sternum and forced him against the nearest wall. He was already pulling back to land a punch when the warning bite of a blade pressed through his shirt into the delicate skin just above his hip bone.

His breath caught harsh in his throat when he caught sight of the black mask, framed by long, unkempt blond hair. 

“Don’t move.” Steve- the Winter Soldier- growled, the hand that shoved him back now roaming over his personage, sifting through his pockets. He’d forgone the goggles, Bucky noted absently, but the dark makeup smudged over his face did little to hide the sunken quality of his eyes. He pulled Bucky’s wallet and phone both from his pockets and tossed them carelessly to the other side of the room, then held him firmly against the wall by the shoulder and put a little more pressure on the knife. “You’ve been trying to track me.”

It wasn’t a question, he didn’t think, but Bucky answered anyways. “I’ve been looking for you, yeah. Haven’t exactly had much luck, either.”

“Stop.” The Soldier commanded, voice every bit as made of steel as it had been in the Army, but without so much as a hint of the emotion that used to drive it. It was disturbing. “You will not bring me in. I will not be reprogrammed again.”

Bucky blanched, having to swallow thickly on the sudden block in his throat. The file Romanoff had given pretty well detailed what ‘reprogrammed’ meant. “No, no, Ste-” He cut himself off, swallowed, and started again. “No. I wouldn’t let ‘em do that to you. That’s not what we do.”

“I’m not going to let you turn me over to the authorities, either.” The Soldier’s voice didn’t change, but Bucky noticed the pressure of the knife let up, just a little bit. He tried not to be too hopeful about it.

Bucky shook his head. “No, I don’t want that either.”

The Soldier narrowed his eyes at him, and the blade twisted to a new angle, as though to remind him it was there. “What  _ do _ you want, then?”

Bucky blinked at him for a few seconds, trying to piece together the words in a way that hopefully wouldn’t set the Soldier off. He couldn’t quite come up with anything, so he switched tactics. “D’you remember me?”

The Soldier dropped both hands and took two steps backward, putting enough distance between them that there wouldn’t be any surprises if either one of them were to attack. Bucky stayed where he was against the wall, but without the blade against his gut, he could relax into a more defensible posture. Bucky held his breath intending to, for the long moment while the Soldier was silent.

“We fought together.” The Soldier replied in a tone so low and flat that Bucky wondered if he was trying to keep something out of his voice. From the way his eyes had gone from cold and hard to abruptly blank, he thought that might be the case. “You were a sniper.”

Bucky clenched his jaw against the sudden tightness in his face. He nodded.

“I remember...” The Soldier trailed into a pause, looking down and away from Bucky for the first time. “I remember a blue jacket. With a wing on the shoulder.” There was finally some inflection in his voice, lending it a distant, pensive quality. His eyes almost softened from the far-away vacancy. “Smelled like... like gun oil. And cigarettes.”

Bucky let the silence of the moment hang, afraid any sound on his end would break whatever was happening in the Soldier. In what might even be Steve.

The moment ended on its own, anyways, with the Soldier’s eyes flashing back to his, clear and steely once again. His grip on the knife had slackened in his quiet moment, but he tightened his fist around it now, and the rest of his body tensed into a more militant stance. Bucky put conscious thought into keeping his own body lax, letting the softness of the moment linger instead of coiling his own body back up to meet the potential threat. 

“I wanna help you,” Bucky answered the question he’d sidestepped before, speaking as softly and gently as he thought he could get away with. “Whatever you need, however you need it, I want. I just wanna help”

The Soldier stared him down, unmoving, as Bucky tracked a stray muscle twitching in his left eyebrow. “Then stop looking for me.”

Then he moved, too swiftly and quickly for Bucky to do anything but abort a forward reach toward him, across the living room and out the balcony door. Bucky didn’t bother trying to go after him, knowing full well that by the time he made it outside the Soldier would be long gone, disappeared into the night as he was so apt to do. 

Instead, he stood in his living alone, cool night breeze wafting in from the still-open door, and for the first time in a very, very long time, he let himself hope.

***

Bucky didn’t tell anyone in the Avengers about the visit, if that was what that encounter could be called, anyways. He’d been tempted, in the first few moments after he’d gathered enough of himself to shut the balcony door. He’d thought about calling Sam, spilling out every detail in the desperate hope Sam might be able to get a better grasp on the Soldier’s chances of recovery, might be able to give Bucky anything,  _ anything _ , to feed the hopefulness budding in his chest. 

But that would depend on Sam being as optimistic as Bucky, and that was too much of a gamble to take. He could tell Romanoff about it, she was probably the most qualified to have an opinion on the subject, but she’d also hinted at some kind of history between her and the Soldier, and he didn’t know if he could trust that she wouldn’t do something to ruin whatever had happened. He wasn’t close enough to anyone else on the team to really involve them in the situation. 

So Bucky ended up where he always seemed to when things got a little too difficult to handle on his own. 

The nursing home in Brooklyn wasn’t as nice as Peggy’s was in D.C., but it was pretty damn good for the area, which was good because Becca apparently couldn’t be persuaded to leave Vinegar Hill. Bucky had to go to bat with the staff about things he thought should be common courtesy a lot more than he’d like, but from the forums he’d read online, nursing homes were usually pretty awful about human decency. Becca, on her one of her good days, had just smiled at him and told him she didn’t mind, since it kept him coming to check up on her at least once a week. 

Becca usually remembered him for who he was, though she usually had a bit of a hard time remembering how he’d gotten to the present day unchanged from nineteen-forty-five. Sometimes she mistook him for her son, or one of her two grandsons (Jim, -named  _ James _ , after him- Darrell or Ronnie, respectively) but she always greeted him with a smile and hug, and he always did his best to go along and make things easier on her. 

Becca was having a very good day the next time he visited, could clearly remember how he’d gotten there, and that he was an Avenger now. When he broached the topic of SHIELD's downfall in D.C., she had some choice words about his former bosses, which was even better than most days. He decided to take it as a sign, and told her all about his encounter with the Soldier. 

When he’d first told Becca about the Winter Soldier (about that fight on the bridge and seeing Steve’s face, gaunt and sallow, on a frame even less familiar than that of Captain America, about how the world stopped spinning and he’d never been so very afraid, and so very euphoric) on another good day not long after he’d come home to Brooklyn, she’d been the only person who’d given any voice to the hopes inside him. She’d been furious that no one else was willing to even entertain the idea that Steve could make a full recovery. It’d been a subject of argument between them for months. 

(“You’re being ridiculous, Bucky.” She’d scowled at him when he’d tried to reason with her, tried to gently explain what he’s seen inside that awful file, and make her understand the chances of anyone making a comeback from that. “This is  _ Stevie _ , we’re talking about. That boy’s got more stubborn in one finger than all of Brooklyn put together. There’s never been a scrape or a sickness on God’s green earth that could keep him down for long. This won’t be any different. He’ll come around. You just be there to patch him up when he comes home.”)

Becca didn’t say a thing as he detailed the encounter, just sat back and let him get every thought he’d had on it in the last week come spilling out as it could only to her. He even told her about being captured, although he hadn’t been planning to, told her about the distress signal he didn’t send. Told her about being cornered in his living room, and the wistful look in the Soldiers eyes when he talked about the jacket.

When he was done, she smiled, slow and clever and smug. Bucky wished he could have been annoyed, or chagrined, or even in denial over it, but he couldn’t find it in him to be anything but a little lightheaded with relief. There was such pride and surety in her eyes, like she’d been waiting for this to happen, like she knew exactly what was going to happen next, and she was already pleased with the ending. 

“Now, Bucky.” Becca breathed sympathetically, the laugh lines around her eyes deepening with tenderness. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“You did, Bec.” Bucky managed a smile at her, grateful beyond words for how stubbornly she’d argued on Steve’s behalf. The look on her face made him feel tired in the best way, like relief and hope and closure all at once. He’d never been so glad to lose an argument before. “I... I didn’t wanna let myself believe it. It’d hurt too much, if I was wrong. I wanna believe it now, but...” He trailed off, remembering every subtle gesture from the encounter. Remembered being told not to look for him. He shrugged. “I don’t know what to do from here.”

Becca scoffed, like he’d asked the most obvious question in the world. “You two’ve always followed each other all over creation, you just can’t help it. Growing up it was like you two had a line strung between you. I’d bet my last dollar that all you gotta do is quit following him, and sooner or later, he’ll come find you.”

So Bucky didn’t tell anyone else about that night. He still took on any developments and leads, but he slowed his investigation into them to a crawl. He made sure to be careful enough on letting off slowly enough that he was fairly sure no one would suspect anything, or at least, nothing he couldn’t cover up with feeling subpar after being captured. (Which wasn’t even a lie, considering how much sleep he’d been losing and how much worse the underlying anxiety had gotten.)

Instead, Bucky tried shifting his focus towards distracting himself with the modern age, the way he’d done in the years between having woken up and finding out Steve was alive. He caught up on the reading he’d neglected since D.C., worked his way through the seemingly ever-growing list of music that the Avengers had complied for him, and spent his weekend nights stepping out to visit bars and dancehalls, letting the surreal familiarity of the venues ease his anxiety. 

He doubled up on training with the other Avengers, too, and still kept his ordinary regiment of going over all Winter Soldier related information with Sam and sometimes Romanoff. Sam probably noticed the gradual distance Bucky started putting between him and the Winter Soldier hunt, and Romanoff definitely did, but when confronted Bucky managed to shrug them off with the approximate truth of ‘just not feeling the same since getting captured’. Sam bought it, Romanoff probably didn’t, but didn’t comment either way.

He visited Becca more often, ran into Jim and both grandsons more than once, and even managed to have a decent conversation with them about the rest of the family. His sister Rose had two daughters, who each had three kids and lived out of state, and his youngest sister Mary had a daughter who’d married another woman and adopted six kids. (And wasn’t that a wonderful thing now, that women could marry each other nowadays and not be in fear of their lives. Stevie would be so proud, if he’d just come around.) He even got their phones and emails, so he could contact them, introduce himself and all that. 

It was an easy way to pass the days, once he settled into a rhythm. Reading, training, missions, going out. One week passed into the next, and some of the tension in him uncoiled. Steve was still on his mind constantly, but he could always call up the memory of that encounter. It felt right, taking things slow, (or as slowly as a superhero could) give Steve the space he wanted. The longer he let it go on, the more certain he was Becca was right, and the more afraid he became that she wasn’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still not Beta read, but I had this part written already so I decided to go ahead and post it.   
> Using Becca as a stand-in for Peggy was my fiancee's idea, since Becca also having dementia is comic-compliant and I just really dig Becca as a character.


End file.
